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The Coffee Summit

ES: Yes! I say that without any hesitation. Because it works. It works.

MM: But it hasn’t worked. That’s why we’re here. The people at Zuccotti Park
believe the system is broken. They see this huge inequality. That you can go to college
and not be guaranteed a job at all. That our life prospects are very slim. People don’t feel
represented.

ES: You’re mixing a lot of issues. Let’s be a bit more rigorous with our
thinking. Globalization, the fact that we’re now competing in the world—many people
think this is a good thing. Two billion additional people are part of the economic system
that, until thirty years ago, was uniquely ours. The good news about that is that many
more people, over time, will participate in the upside. The downside is that we here are
finding the terms of our own engagement shifting away in a way that many of us find
unfair. That is separate from campaign finance. Yes, they’re indirectly related, but you have to separate the issues that you focus on.

MM: At Occupy Wall Street, or occupy anywhere, people don’t see these as
separate issues.

New York: Eliot, right before you got here, Manissa asked, “Are
we making them nervous?” Can you give us some perspective on how Wall Street might
be perceiving this movement?

ES: Let me say this—and don’t forget, I was not exactly Wall Street’s
favorite—finance is an important part of our lives. The question is how you do it. The
notion of being able to borrow money, to put money into a checking account, to earn
interest, to borrow in order to buy a house or set up a business—this is what makes things
happen and work.

New York: Is that what the U.S. financial system actually does?

ES: That’s the issue. Has the finance system become something else? Is it
now a process of creating things like CDOs-squared, mechanisms to gamble as opposed
to using finance properly? A guy like Paul Volcker, an extremely wise person, he
would say, “Wait a minute, guys, here’s how we need to reform it.” Now, Volcker is as
Establishment as you can get—he was chairman of the Fed for umpteen years, right?
He’s a banker, through and through. But he understands what needs to be done. And so
you can’t really generalize about how they feel.

MM: The discussion at Occupy Wall Street is dramatically different from this
discussion. Sure, there are a lot of people who are thinking about how to reform the
system. But there are also a lot of people asking why all of their value has to do with their
employment or how much money they make?

ES: Can I say this? People shouldn’t think of themselves that way. There are
some people who are always going to value themselves based upon the size of their
paycheck. That’s their choice.

MM: The value of my paycheck, it also has to do with how much power I have
in the world, right? Money and power—these things are very connected. Occupy Wall
Street is trying to disconnect the two.

ES: Let me ask you a question. Looking at the last century, who do you think
has been an effective voice for these values?

MM: This movement does not necessarily have a historical precedent. The
movements in Spain in Greece are thinking about the same questions we are. Questions
like, How do we create communities that aren’t based on capital and valuing things in
terms of money? How do you create those sorts of communities? That’s what is exciting
about being in a space like Zuccotti Park: It’s a place where you have the chance to radically reimagine the world.

New York: How are you reimagining it?

MM: It’s saying: We’re actually here in this space. We’re going to try and
figure out our problems ourselves. How to run a country of 300 million people like that
is an open-ended question. But I think talking; letting people make decisions about their
own lives; letting people take part in local, neighborhood forms of governance—these are
some ways to start.

ES: Look, some people tried to dismiss this movement early on because
it doesn’t have specific demands. I said that was irrelevant. The point now is to be
speaking with passion about dissatisfaction and setting an agenda for the conversation.
But eventually, to succeed, you do need to have some sense of how you change things.
Otherwise you’re going around in a circle.

MM: Success means different things to different people—

ES: —at different points in time—

MM: What Occupy Wall Street has already done is create a space for people
to come together and voice dissent in a way that has not been possible in this city, or
this country, for a long time.